On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:16 AM, SteveC <st...@asklater.com> wrote: > > There is a slight contradiction here though because the other thing I hear > a lot is they'd like to try something with us but keep it quiet - i.e. try > something small, but that's extremely hard with an open community. >
I find the exact opposite: the majority of the projects related to OSM in the past few years have been done in relative quiet. The tools that OSMers use are developed by a small group (or single person) in a bunker somewhere. They infrequently pop up on IRC or the mailing list and ask a question or two, then return to their bunkers to work on their project. When they're done, they might tell someone (they might not). I imagine that a large company (or more likely a bunch of like-minded developers in that company) could do the same. If we can figure out a way to bring the community together and embrace each other's tools, then we will not only solve that problem for the "hobby" tools we currently write, but also the "corporate" ones. > So you have a sort of prisoners dilemma where we're the company is acting > rationally, OSM is acting (sort of) rationally... and yet it leads to the > worst possible outcome: no big help given. I find it frustrating on both > sides of the table. > The same thing can be said for non-corporate help. See for example the time that Tim Berners-Lee made a single post on the mailing list a while back we hounded him with suggestions or questions and sort of scared him off (at least from the mailing list). Again, if we do a better job at accepting non-corporate people we can also do a better job at accepting corporate help. > So what will happen is that they do something themselves without OSM > involvement and it just pops up in the world one day like wolfram alpha or > flickr did and then build their own site reminiscent of > maps.cloudmade.comwith either just plain browsing the map functionality or > some simple tools. > You will see this happen multiple times with other companies over the next > year or two. > When this sort of thing happens on the "free"/"community"/"mailing list" side of things, someone usually pops up somewhere saying "hey I'm doing this neat thing, what do you think?" In your examples the people are talking directly to you, Steve. Could you redirect them to the mailing list? If talk is too scary, then maybe this what the professionals mailing list was meant for. Bottom line: the community can't help anyone if it doesn't know anything about the problem. That's of course totally fine and allowable by the license blah blah blah, > but what we, OSM, lose as a community is all of those eyeballs to help fix > the map. I think that's a terrific loss. There are things we can do to fix > it, and there are things they can do. > > I'm hoping that we'll reach a point where the dam will bust and it will be > cool and fashionable to support OSM openly and loudly, but we're not quite > there yet. > Are we not there yet because we're scaring them off? If so, maybe the community could open its mind and eyes a little bit when ideas like these come in instead of scaring them off with questions about legality and server load and whatnot.
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